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Welcome to In Defence Of Product Documentation and I'm Natasha Awasthi.

Did you intend to be here?

I was expecting nobody given the topic of discussion.

As I said, am Natasha Awasthi and

I am a Product Management Instructor at General Assembly.

I'm moonlight in that role.

My real job is a business designer and I work for Systems.

I've been in the role, well at the place since 2006, I describe the role as,

like how dev-ops is at the intersection of development and ops.

Business design I describe it as, at the intersection of ops and product.

So let me tell you my story a little bit.

I wanted to be a dancer, so naturally I went and got a degree in statistics.

And I didn't give up.

I got a second degree in statistics and

then got a job with GE in their analytics division.

So that was a dream.

I started in a product row.

What we built, I describe it as a lift, I don't wanna say Uber.

A lift for stranded aircraft engines.

If they needed a part, our solution would help locate it.

The goal was to find the closest, cheapest, fastest location for the part.

So that's how I started.

Never left product.

10 years later I came back to my dream.

And I said, hey, I'm gonna go back to school and get a degree, and

I got an MBA [LAUGH].

That pretty much sealed the deal here.

Then the product is where I'm gonna be.

I'm not complaining, in fact I love being in product, like any true product person,

I love the messy but satisfying business of building stuff.

And so, what is documentation gonna have to do with any of this?

I'm gonna try to go down the steps without falling down.

And is that okay Dan, if I'm down here?

>> Yeah.

>> All right, [LAUGH] surprised him and me.

Habit, I might cold call on you, because that's what I do when I teach.

So be ready.

But yeah, so Jennifer today, why and when will,

in the context of future, will product people need documentation?

And how can they be reimagined, so the authors and

the readers don't cry at the sight of these artifacts?

A couple hints, the why and when.

I'm arguing there are scenarios where the artifact we produce,

acts as a reusable asset that give organizations speed, agility.

That's the entire session, so I'll tell you more about that.

And how can they be reimagined so we don't cry?

I'm arguing that if mainstream media and newspapers,

etc are poo-pooing print and they're swaying away from paper,

and engaging their audience in exciting ways, I'm sure we can do that too.

So what can that be?

That's the pitch, but I'm gonna [LAUGH] start with a rant.

I've worked in Agile since 2006, so I'm all about Agile.

We're an award winning Agile shop.

And we all know that the Agile Manifesto was the middle

finger to the wonderful old school of pot.

It was necessary, I'm on board with that.

But God forbid, if I have something to say that does not fit

on a sticky not, it's like what old school fart are you?

And I'm like, okay.

So that's my [LAUGH] rant.

I'm arguing there are scenarios in which

your pictionary supplies won't suffice to build a system or a solution.

Okay, stop rant, go back to the future.

So let's talk about the future.

Andreessen Horowitz, this is the cool kids on the VC block.

Their portfolio includes Twitter, Facebook, BuzzFeed, AirBnB.

I'm sure I'm missing some cool other kid in their portfolio.

When you land on their website, it's a16z.com, it politely tells you and

reminds you that software is eating the world.

Don't agree with them.

Steve Case, this is the father of AOL, wrote an op-ed in Washington Post and

for the rest of my Steve Case tidbit, you should imagine that

the Game of Thrones' soundtrack is playing in the background.

Cuz it had this really dramatic voice and I'm gonna try and replicate it.

So, he said, get ready!

The Internet is about to change again.

Here's how.

[SOUND] Okay.

Three waves of Internet.

The first one was 30 years ago.

It was The Internet.

It was about building infrastructure, the information superhighway.

The second wave, the [INAUDIBLE], it was about building on top of the Internet.

And then, wait for it, the third wave is coming.

Companies will take on some of the most gnarly and

complicated and largest sectors, which are healthcare,

education, transportation, energy, [SOUND].

In other words,

I'm arguing that he's agreeing that software is eating the world.

I'm also saying, the world is not gonna go down without a fight.

It's gonna fight back with making us deal with, and wrangle with, policies.

When we think about education for instance, or healthcare for instance or

financial services for instance, we're gonna have to get in there and

deal with bureaucracy, and play that game.

Partnerships are gonna be a big part of our offering.

And we're in for the long-haul, because these are complicated sectors.

Not to say, again, I mean, don't tune out or leave the room.

If that's not a sector in which you're playing, they might not be

the attributes of your business, but there may be parts of your solution or

your product that shares these attributes as well.

So if that's the context we're playing in, what we're saying is,

that the complexity of the product landscape is gonna go up.

It's gonna get messy and gnarly.

And hey, one more thing.

So that's one aspect.

The other aspect is the full stack start-ups.

I don't want to assume how many of you have heard it, just curious to know.

I found the term, I was really happy,

cuz it kind of articulates what I wanted to talk about.

Show of hands to see?

Okay, good.

So I feel good, like I'm throwing something at you [LAUGH] that's new and

unfamiliar.

The full stack start-up is again introduced

by the cool kids at Andreessen-Horowitz shop.

The notion here is, they were only trying to come up with a term that articulates

the notion of wholeness of an offering.

From beginning to end.

So, and I'll give you an example, Buzzfeed.

They produce the content, but they all deliver it,

they have to think about marketing it and so on and so forth.

Warby Parker is another example, I'm not wearing them by the way.

I get asked all the time.

So these are offerings where

you need to look at many different things besides just the software.

Hardware design consumer marketing, supply chain management, sales, and partnerships,

regulation, all of this is in the mix.

So, if these are the two things and it's really, of course,

I have a two by two for that.

So I put the two things together, and I'm arguing that

if we're playing in a landscape where complexity is increasing,

because of policies, perseverance,

the long haul argument [LAUGH], and partnerships that we have to play with.

And if, with increasing full stackness of products and services.

If we plot them, we have a two by two,

the product teams and organizations, will fall in one of these spots.

And if you do, you have to think about your services,

your offerings, your operation in a different way.

Again I'd like to say, if you're not in a business,

let's just say you're not gonna be a full stack organization.

However you could still, I would argue, use this two by two.

If you look at aspects of your product that share these attributes,

other aspects of your product that are extremely complex and mired in regulation.

So what does that mean?

We'll get into more of this.

I'm not gonna throw walls and walls of text at you, but

I'm going to ignore that one aspect, which supports my argument naturally.

But let's do the extremes.

I'm saying, if you're in a low complexity product scenario, and

it's not a multi-layered solution, your team could take a task oriented focus,

and I'll tell you a little more about that.

And if you're on the top right, where it's a really complex product And

a multi-layered solution and offering, you need a strategic mind set.

But, why am I saying that?

If you're up there, somewhere, we're saying that, so, let's do an example.

If you are in, say, health care, money management, think betterment.

So this is high regulation, you have to think about the operations,

you have to think about the actual product.

You have to think about marketing, but you also have to think about customer service,

cause every touch point is going to affect your experience with the offering.

So given the complexity, I'm arguing that the learning curve is high and

there's a high need for scaling knowledge of empathy organization wide.

You cannot have pockets of knowledge sitting in the product people's head,

it cannot.

If you have this whole stack, imagine this whole stack that's

powering this product or service you have in the market.

You cannot have siloed, knowledge, and understanding that sits

in the pocket as say, just the product team, or sits in the head of a few people.

Why do I say that?

That's because again,

your consumer's interacting with every layer of your stack.

If you need somebody in customer service do creatively act, and quickly act.

They need knowledge and information.

And so, the empathy say the product team, or

the product design team, has gained cannot sit in this one layer.

So, I think, whats the start.

Yep.

So for agility, all your layers of the stack need to be creative and confident.

That confidence is going to come from knowledge.

Strategic, another, so you know, we talked about the stack and all layers of it, but

then just even if we think about product.

If you're in that space where your product is complicated and

there are partners involved, and there's policy involved.

The product team has to be strategic in the act, in the choices they make.

They have to think about impact, the lead times get longer, so yes we wanna

act quickly, but we have to think about the prices of the choices we make.

So that's where we're playing.

What does that mean?

I'm not gonna bore you with all of this.

It's in the deck.

So then I read in the one extreme.

You have this handy.

And if we have time in the end, maybe we can go back to this slide.

And so then I gave you the attributes for the others corners of the game.

So now we come to the topic of documentation.

If that's where we're playing in this complex full stack-ish zone.

I'm arguing you need documentation.

The type you need is,

it's gotta be engaging, it's gotta be fun, but it has to be a reusable asset.

And it has to be something you share on a predictable rhythm.

This goes back to the notion of scaling your insights and sharing it and

empowering your team.

And then the focus.

I brought this up because it's another one of my pet peeves.

I won't go into a rant, but it's a rant of sort.

In a situation like this, the focus of the artifacts we produce

as the product team or product people, can not just be,

hey here is the outcome, why don't you just go play with the product.

Or hey look at the demo of the product and go figure it out.

Given the complexity of the situation,

we need more than just, hey, here's the outcome, or, hey,

here's the high-fidelity wire frame, is it not obvious to you?

Why is that a problem for somebody like me?

If you hire somebody like me, I'm a problem child,

cause I'm gonna ask you many questions.

My intention's not to derail you, I just want to gain confidence, and

feel like I can participate.

And make decisions going forward.

I'm well aware that maybe I jumped on a moving train.

So the information I'm seeking, the knowledge I want to gain is so

I don't do derail you, but so I can make the right decisions going forward.

And oh, there you go.

So I'm one of those problem people where

I'd say telling anybody actually, not just me.

But just telling people what to do without backing it up with why you're saying so,

or why you think so, is probably the quickest way to disengage smart people.

And you can end up with an entire stack

of disengaged people if they don't understand where you're coming from.

So that's the context.

That thing you do.

That's the other pet peeve, like this, I'm just going on a rant again

about this notion of being really mysterious about how you got there.

I mean, it's a really cool idea.

We don't like to believe that we're struck by fantastic ideas and creative thinking

is non linear, and I don't know how I got there, so I can't share it with you.

But as an organization where you have to consistently deliver ideas and

consistently compete, you've got to have some sense and system to this madness.

So that's my argument around, give me the breadcrumbs, tell me how you got there, so

I don't derail you and I feel confident to keep us moving forward.

I don't like mysteries, because again I want to participate and play.

So really all of this was to build a context on why and

when will product people need documentation going forward.

If that's the context we're in, then how can they be reimagined so

we don't feel like we're gonna die, when I say we, it's just the people who create

them, I'm one of those people, and people who have to consume them.

And again, out of sheer curiosity,

how many of you are on the other side of producing documentation?

How many of you are consumers of the artifacts a product manager might produce?

Okay, so you're suffering the consequences of my choices [LAUGH] and decisions.

Okay, good.

Well, here's the bait and switch.

I'm not saying that we're gonna produce new types of artifacts.

I'm gonna show you another wall of list of things and artifacts we produce.

Some of them are new, and they're sexy and they're useful and they're fun.

I think the real innovation isn't really what artifacts we produce,

as product managers.

But how we'll deliver our insights and how we engage our teammates.

So this is another world.

You don't have to dive in, I mean, I could just throw the kitchen sink at you and

all the artifacts that are produced.

There's this notion of empathy statement, system maps,

visions and personas, and story boards, blueprints, journey maps.

Consumption chain analysis.

These are all exciting things.

And we'll continue to add more things to the list.

I think where the fun is gonna be is, this is not my goal.

I don't imagine there's gonna be a day when an engineer is gonna jump out of bed,

and say, hey, let me go take a look at my product backlog.

That's crazy talk, I'm not going for that.

But could I do something that inspires them to say, hey what's new?

Did we learn something new?

What's new in the industry?

Is there a new piece of research that came out?

Or hey, did we learn something surprising about the segment of our mark ad?

Is there a way to engage people so that they're not horrified or

cringe at the idea of another email from a product manager?

So, I mean, another way to put this is,

organizations spend so much time and energy in making the message

to the customer, your external message should be so exciting and engaging.

So the voice to the customer should be exciting, but

then I'm arguing, why shouldn't the voice of the customer,

which is the product manager, to their team, be exciting and engaging also?

There is research around it, there's work, I mean the capabilities exist,

we know how to reach an audience and engage them.

Is there value in looking at those capabilities, and using them?

Turning it inward, right?

So that's what I'm pushing for.

To give you an example, this is not something I produced by the way.

This was a piece in Nautilus, I must be butchering the name of the magazine.

Does it sound familiar?

It's a science magazine.

And they had an artist talk about her experience of PTSD.

She did this graphic representation of it.

They had an outpouring of response, not just from people who suffered from it.

But it popped pictures and surprised people who'd been treating PTSD.

They said it gave us an entirely new way, and a perspective, on a condition.

What are we doing with this?

I have been doing a lot of research, I work in healthcare, oh I should have said

that, I work in healthcare, that's where I spend a lot of my time.

And I'm working with patients who,

I'm working with an organization that works.

In cancer, and we're working with their patients.

They're working on scaling empathy within their organization, so

we understand who we're servicing.

I've done the interviews, which we do, we've done the journey maps,

we've done the empathy mapping, and yet we brought this up and said, would you be

interested In pulling together an artifact like this that tells the story?

Lo and behold, we did get the funding, so

now we have to find somebody who has the chops to pull this together.

We have the insights, we need to tell the story.

That, to me, is exciting.

And it’s not the kind of mindset people had a while ago.

I'm not sure what influenced the change and what unlocked the budget, but

we do have the budget to do something like this now.

The other thing that's changing, for

example, is this interest in video content.

Nothing pops a picture of somebody

better than the voice, the actual voice, not the proxy voice though,

the product manager who goes and speaks on behalf of somebody.

But the actual voice of a person suffering a problem.

So, it's another story and maybe I'll come back to it, towards the end of it.

But those are our opportunities, so like I said, it was a bait-and-switch of sorts.

When I say documentation, I use the term loosely.

It's about creating assets that we can reuse to tell our story,

and there are creative ways to do that, but there's an implication.

Not everyone can create this.

Not everyone can create really high-quality video content that

works as an asset, for example.

So here we are.

So this is an experiment that I'm doing as we speak.

And as I said, I don't have results as yet.

I don't know if this is gonna change the way people engage with the content we

produce.

But on a current project,

what we're doing is we've built this whole ecosystem of content.

We're doing the typical work that product managers do, but we're running a blog.

If you think about how we're architecting the information,

you could think about the Future Insights website.

Right now, that's how we're modelling the information.

So, where we have speakers, we have our team listed and

their background and what they're bringing to the table.

If you think about the schedule, that's our project schedule.

So we've set them up as events.

Your life cycle is set up as events.

Our show and tell are set up as events.

We send reminders, and we brag about it, and we try to get people to come to it.

And then, the social aspect of it is we have a secret Twitter handle.

It's secret to us, within our organization.

But we have somebody who is actually tweeting live to

engage people with the content.

And this is the stuff I mentioned about.

Is there new research that relates back to the project we're working on?

Is there something in the industry that's shifting?

Who are our competitors?

Let's follow them, let's see what they're doing.

A newsletter, we're running a newsletter that goes out on a weekly basis.

And we're creating high-ish

quality video content to tell our story and pop the picture around,

again, the stories of the people for whom we want to build stuff.

But so to pull that off,

really the implication was given that was the ecosystem and that,

those are the activities, the ones you saw on the prior slide that we had to do.

There's an implication,

I mean the end goal really is to build stuff that people love.

But then the implication was,

internally we didn't have the capabilities or talents.

Not everyone can just get up one day and say hey, I'm gonna write blog posts, or

I'm gonna create really sexy, engaging content.

Takes training.

So on the internal processing side we needed to invest money and training.

So I went for a few classes and so did others.

We had to create space in our plans.

You can't just ask people to do more work and not create time for them to do it.

So create space in your project plans and

in your activities to do these, and create these artifacts.

On the talent side, I'm calling myself talent, but on the product or talent or

employee side, the implication is you're going to have to crate routines and

new routines.

We're using habit forming apps as a way to change the way we behave.

To see if we can sit every day for

x number of hours and actually generate these artifacts.

I like people, I like interacting with people.

Sitting at a desk and typing away is not something that comes to me naturally.

I have to work really hard to do it.

So it's about creating routines and rhythms.

I mean it goes back though, to internal processing, and leaders, people within

your organizations making the investment to let you do these activities naturally.

But I'd also say this, and

you kind of touched upon this with your question in some ways.

But there's all this talk about,

why don't we get product managers to think like engineers?

Why don't we send them through rotational programs?

And I cannot remember which brand does it now, it's slipping my mind.

But they send you through these rotational programs where

product managers are asked to learn how to code.

And that's great.

I think there's another opportunity,

maybe we should be training our product managers in digital marketing.

Because these are things that don't, again, like I said, people go to school.

There's a science behind how you create content and

engage people in the content you create.

Maybe that's another opportunity to consider.

So, we can pull this off.

So, well, I'm kind of gonna still be on time.

So this is my storyline.

So, the summary for

you, the rapider version of the rapid version you just heard.

As I said, I'm arguing that software is eating the world.

I'm not gonna touch the thing again.

The world is not gonna go down without a fight.

It's gonna fight back by making it really complicated for us.

We're gonna have to deal with policies.

We're gonna have to be in it for the long haul.

There's partnerships involved.

We're gonna have to learn how to play nice.

And hey, either aspects of our business or

product or just our entire business is gonna be really complicated.

And if that's where we're gonna play on the top right corner,

then I'm saying that your need for reusable assets is high.

Your focus cannot just be on, hey, here's the outcome but

hey, this is how we got here.

Telling people because, telling people what to do without backing it up,

with why you think so, is probably the most efficient way to disengage them.

We talked about this.

Because I'm arguing that the innovation isn't in the artifacts we produce,

but how we engage our audience.

Because all we product people want to do is build stuff that people will love.

Me, I'm just in pursuit of magic.

It was a sign I saw so I just took a picture and I put it up here.

It was the message I want to give.

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